Close Beside the Winding Cedar

For anyone who has set foot in East Lansing, the Red Cedar River is iconic. One of the most beloved and well known features on Michigan State University's campus, the Red Cedar is a place of recreation, contemplation, learning, and connection to the natural world. Spartans hail the Red Cedar every time they sing the school's fight song, and the river is featured in many campus traditions going back to 1855.

Yet, despite its iconic status, the Red Cedar is also often overlooked. The Red Cedar River was largely excluded from both the early and historical accounts of the school and campus. Some consider the Red Cedar to be dirty, denigrating it as the "Dead Cedar" or the "Red Sewer" and dumping litter and other waste into the river.

Whether acknowledged or not, the Red Cedar played a huge role in the founding and growth of the State Agricultural School, impacting everything from the selection of the campus site, providing materials for the first buildings, and shaping the campus in ways both visible and invisible. Close Beside the Winding Cedar highlights the special relationship between the river and the school throughout its history, along with information on the history of the river from before the State Agricultural School, including its formation, early uses, and naming.

From its headwaters in Cedar Lake in Livingston County’s Marion Township, the Red Cedar River flows in a westerly direction for 51 miles, through the towns of Fowlerville, Webberville, Williamston, Okemos, and East Lansing before joining the Grand River south of downtown Lansing. The wide valley that makes up the main westward channel for the Red Cedar was formed approximately 12000 years ago by the flow of melting glacial runoff as at the end of the last ice age. Around the newly formed river the retreating glacier left behind a flat, wet terrain that developed into a swampy lowland. It was into this habitat that a new population of plants, animals and eventually people moved to make southern Michigan home as the glacial ice melted away.

As the first people of Michigan moved into the state, the Red Cedar River formed part of an important river network for travel and trade. The Red Cedar River flows through the lands of the Anishinaabeg–Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples and was a shared space for all Anishinaabe who gathered there for seasonal hunting, fishing, trading, and harvesting maple sugar. With its connections to the Grand River and Sycamore Creek and proximity to the Grand River trail, the Red Cedar was a major crossroads on both land and water that facilitated travel across the entire width of southern Michigan.

Annual gatherings near the confluence of the Grand and Red Cedar Rivers in early autumn featured dancing and feasting lasting several days in addition to hunting and food gathering in preparation for winter. Although there were no known settlements along the Red Cedar within the boundaries of East Lansing or the MSU campus, there were small, seasonal villages near present day Okemos, Williamston, and Fowlerville. Agricultural practices along the Red Cedar included cultivating corn, beans, pumpkin, and melons, with surplus crops stored in food caches dug out along the riverbanks.

As trappers and traders moved into the territory, they also used the river for transportation. The earliest known recorded instance of a European encountering the Red Cedar came in 1790 when Hugh Heward traveled across the state via waterways, eventually making his way from Detroit to Chicago. Although Heward’s time on the Red Cedar was brief and confined to the area around its confluences with the Grand River and Sycamore Creek, he does describe encountering two cabins belonging to a group of Ojibwe hunters. It was not long after Heward’s journey that pressure from fur trappers and settlers began the process of dispossessing the Anishinaabe of their land not only around the Red Cedar but also across Michigan.

In 1819, territorial governor Lewis Cass, on behalf of the United States government, took control of much of the land through which the Red Cedar runs by entering into the Treaty of Saginaw with the Ottawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi people. The chiefs who signed the treaty ceded six million acres of land in the hope that they would be able to maintain their lifestyle and peacefully coexist within land reserves after the prolonged conflict of the War of 1812. Article 5 of the treaty guaranteed hunting and fishing rights within the ceded lands, and bands of Ottawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi people continued to traverse the Red Cedar to hunt, fish, farm, and trade with the white settlers who moved into the territory.

As more white settlers moved into the area, the United States government began efforts to forcibly remove the tribes from Michigan, relocating them to reservations west of the Missouri River. The number of Ottawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi people living on and traveling through the Red Cedar basin shrunk, although small bands remained uncaptured with some integrating into the developing urban centers in the region such as Lansing.

The river's name has changed many times. Franklin Ellis claimed the Ojibwe called it Iosco as it flowed through Iosco Township near its headwaters. This claim is unlikely to be true, however, as the name Iosco was invented by Henry Schoolcraft in 1840 when he named Iosco County.

In an 1824 survey for Ingham County, Joseph Wampler referred to the river as Misticen. This name appears in no other contemporaneous documentation.

In a later article published in the Lansing State Journal Theodore Foster, a Michigan Historian specializing in place names, theorized Misticen could be an anglicized spelling of the Algonquin word 'Mistissen' which was the name of a large rock in Lake Mistassini in Quebec, Canada.

Foster proposed that Wampler may have been inspired to use the name Misticen by the large rock situated approximately half way between campus and Lansing that would come to be known to students as Half Way Rock or Split Rock. In any case, the name never gained popularity.

Contemporaneous survey notes from 1824 also refer to the river as Cedar River, and that name was regularly used interchangeably with Red Cedar. William Beal wrote that the name referred to cedar trees along the banks on campus. Although Red Cedar became the preferred name in local use, the US Department of the Interior selected Cedar River for use in all federally published documents and maps.

It was not until the 1960s that the official name matched the local nomenclature. Milton Adams, the director of the Michigan Water Resources Commission, in his petition letter to the US Geological Survey's Board on Geographic Names (BGN), spoke of the importance of the Red Cedar River, where "countless great careers have been launched, life-long romances have budded, and strong characters have been wrought...on the banks of the 'Red' Cedar." The BGN accepted the petition and the river was officially recognized as the Red Cedar River in 1966.

In the early days, the Red Cedar played a crucial role in shaping the campus. The school built out bridges and dams, remaking the riverfront and the surrounding landscape. The river also provided the materials for a growing campus, including the tiles for draining the wetlands, the bricks to build the first buildings, and a power plant to heat and power the developing campus.

The river has long been a magnet for a wide range of student activities from peaceful recreation and romance to violence and vengeance. Strict expectations of behavior for students, and occasionally even members of the community, were regularly enforced via involuntary dips in the river. Student use of the Red Cedar was not limited to hi-jinks, however, as the often peaceful stream has long attracted nature lovers and romantic couples as well.

During its industrial era, the Red Cedar River facilitated the growth and development of the campus. The riverfront was the site of the first boiler house and power plant, providing heat and electricity to the academic, residential, and agricultural buildings. The Red Cedar also suffered as a dumping ground, receiving everything from human waste to industrial toxins. Over time, the development of waste treatment plants and government regulations greatly reduced pollution in the river. At the same time campus power plants shifted away from the river, transforming the waterfront into the park-like extension of the "sacred space" that it is today.

The Red Cedar, flowing through central campus, winds past many athletic facilities and has become the site for several events and traditions. The grandstand at the athletic fields was one of the first structures built south of the river and many Spartans competed in Old College Field "on the banks of the Red Cedar."

Occasionally contests were disrupted by floodwaters and other natural phenomena as cross country running races followed the river's banks, the first hockey matches on campus occurred on the frozen river, and the earliest football and baseball games occurred within the floodplain. The river remained an important site for the football team even after they moved to Macklin Field (now Spartan Stadium) outside of commonly flooded areas. The Spartan Walk follows football players and coaches on a ceremonial walk as they cross the river to enter the stadium before every home game. At times, the river played a more active role in motivating the football team through surprise self duckings and as a tool for emergency stadium preparation before for a football game.

During WWII, many star college athletes enrolled in the military and found themselves playing for teams associated with their branch of service against ordinary college teams. Before one such game between MSC and the Navy Great Lakes Stars, the MSC football coach Charlie Bachman was so confident his team would lose that he promised to walk on water if they won in an upset. Of course, MSC rose to the occasion and beat the Stars 14-0 leading to Bachman taking a cold and wet walk across the river the following morning.

In November, 1951, an early snow storm complicated preparations for an upcoming football game. Student volunteers created chutes out of plywood and sheet metal to clear the bleachers of snow, which was then shoveled into trucks and dumped behind the Women's Gym (IM Circle) and bulldozed into the river. The game proceeded as scheduled, a 35 to 0 victory over number 11 ranked Notre Dame.

During World War II, the Physical Education Department created a safety skills course intended to prepare students for the rigors of military training and combat. The course culminated in students completing an outdoor obstacle course.

The obstacle course started at the west entrance to the Jenison Field House and followed the perimeter of the athletic fields before crossing the river, up the steep slope, and returning along the road to the Field House.

The Safety Skills Course also became part of the curriculum for the Air Force College Training Aircrew who attended MSC for general education prior to flight training. The Aircrew students demonstrated an impressive performance on the obstacle course, with a young man named William Foster setting a new record of 6:39 to complete the 1800 yard course. An earlier record was held by East Lansing native and MSC student Bruce Greenman.

The natural beauty of the Red Cedar has inspired artists for over a century. Spartans have written poems, sung songs, and painted pictures of the Red Cedar and its banks. One of the earliest published works of art appeared in The College Speculum student newspaper in 1882. The poem, titled "Twenty Years Ago" described life on campus in the early 1860s and was performed at an alumni meeting by Frank Hodgman in 1882.

The poem describes the river as appearing smaller and without the old log bridge used to cross the water.

The Farm Lane Bridge has also been the subject of poetry. Elmer Hock, from the class of 1912, lamented the loss of the old wooden structure as he described lovers crossing the bridge, children playing under the expanse, and the river flooded with snow and ice flowing past.

The MSU fight song cheers the Spartan athletes competing "On the Banks of the Red Cedar," but the original Alma Mater also opened with a reference to the river. The opening line of "Close Beside the Winding Cedar" also served as the song's title. The song reused a well known melody, and the desire for a fully original tune ultimately led to its replacement by M.S.C. Shadows as the Alma Mater in 1949.

The Red Cedar River is many things; an icon, an inspiration, and a symbol of the university. Nowhere is the symbolic significance more clear than in William Beal's document "M.A.C. Represented by a Stream" from the "History of the Michigan Agricultural College." This timeline depicts major events in the history of the school as tributaries flowing into an ever widening stream, making literal the idea that the history of the school and the history of the river are one and the same. 

The Red Cedar River holds a special place in the hearts of Spartans everywhere. It is a place for recreation and contemplation, research and learning, and connection to the natural world as well as a habitat for fish, birds, insects and many other creatures. Michigan State University was built both on and from the banks of the Red Cedar. The river provided both the template and first building blocks for campus development, while also inspiring art and traditions. The campus relied on the river to meet its industrial needs and later worked to restore the river’s health after its degradation. The river and the university share a history as it flows over the campus, both constant and dynamic, from the beginning but ever changing.

Contact Eric Tans at tans@msu.edu with comments, questions, or corrections.

This StoryMap is the product of the MSU Libraries Digital Scholarship Lab and DH@MSU Project Incubator. Special thanks to Jennie Rankin, Leslie McRoberts, Kate Topham, Kristin Mapes, and Autumn Boyd for their assistance with this project.

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